Archives for September, 2008

I’m reading Steven L. Kent’s engrossing 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and of course it reminds me of a lot of games I played as a kid. My first real video games were played on the Atari VCS/2600. (The book is in my home because my 10-y-o son is both a video…

My erudite friend Florence Vilén (historian of religion, haiku poet, aficionado of gems and classical music) has published her first novel in Swedish. Tungelblodet (“Blood of the Moon”) is high fantasy set in a northern archipelago where wind-witches help fishermen to make good catches. Florence cites Tolkien, LeGuin and Ende as her favourite fantasists (and…

For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other convenient surfaces all around the Swedish capital, as…

Here’s another whine about academic employment in Scandy archaeology. Yesterday my PhD diploma turned five years old. This means that I have now, at age 36, ascended to heights where I am automatically considered over-qualified (or simply failed) for a forskarassistent entry-level assistant professor’s position at Swedish universities. Having done research full-time for the past…

There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia regarding certain facets of the on-line encyclopedia’s controversial notability policy. At heart, it’s about where the line should be drawn between notable subjects (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and non-notable ones (Shitty Arnie, my wife’s cat), articles about which should be deleted. There are two main issues with WP:Notability that…

Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is usually two metal planes reflecting…

We finished digging today. Tomorrow I’ll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned. A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand: Scattered…

The fiftieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Yann Klimentidis’ Weblog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Belqas, a town in the north-western corner of the Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt. Belqas comprises in its jurisdictions the well known resort of Gamasa. Belqas is also known for its natural gas fields in the region of…

Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology — it’s time to contribute good new blog entries to next week’s Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn’t have written them yourself: if you’ve found something worth reading recently, submit it to Yann at the Yann Klimentidis Weblog.